PDS Nodes

PDS Support

Welcome to the PDS Small Bodies Node

The Small Bodies Node (SBN), a part of NASA's Planetary Data System, specializes in the archiving, cataloging, and distributing of scientific data sets relevant to asteroids, comets and interplanetary dust.

More specifically, SBN seeks to archive data from:

space missions (primarily NASA, but also from other national agencies) that target small bodies or that have collected small bodies data

laboratory and ground-based data collected in support of small bodies missions as well as contributed ground-based observations

collected information about small bodies from published literature

NASA missions are obligated to archive their data within PDS so most of the data is related to and in support of NASA missions. Ground-based observers are not required to archive their data (because they are often funded from non-NASA/public sources) but are welcome to contribute their data.

Data Analysis Proposals Support

ATTENTION! If you are planning to use PDS data for your ROSES data analysis proposal (e.g., Discovery Data Analysis Program, Cassini Data Analysis, Lunar Data Analysis, etc), please check its status indicated on the top of each dataset webpage. Only the datasets with the status "certified," "archived," or "locally archived" are eligible for such proposals. Datasets with the status "non-certified," "safed," or "in peer review" are typically not eligible for ROSES data analysis programs.

Data Release Schedule

We now have a data release schedule that has the proposed dates of when data provided to the SBN for archiving will be publicly available. This is a proposed schedule and users should not be surprised if missions are late.